There it is. It doesn’t do not to love the fine arts; so Polly is continually cluttering up the halls and staircases with marble, and sending me heavy bills for the same.
When the house was ready, and my wife had purchased the furniture, she came and said to me:
“Now, my dear P., there is one thing we haven’t thought of.”
“What’s that?”
“Pictures, you know, dear.”
“What do you want pictures for?” growled I, rather surlily, I am afraid.
“Why, to furnish the walls; what do you suppose we want pictures for?”
“I tell you, Polly,” said I, “that pictures are the most extravagant kind of furniture. Pshaw! a man rubs and dabbles a little upon a canvas two feet square, and then coolly asks three hundred dollars for it.”
“Dear me, Pot,” she answered, “I don’t want home-made pictures. What an idea! Do you think I’d have pictures on my walls that were painted in this country?—No, my dear husband, let us have some choice specimens of the old masters. A landscape by Rayfel, for instance; or one of Angel’s fruit pieces, or a cattle scene by Verynees, or a Madonna of Giddo’s, or a boar hunt of Hannibal Crackkey’s.”
What was the use of fighting against this sort of thing? I told her to have it her own way. Mrs. P. consulted Singe the pastry cook, who told her his cousin had just come out from Italy with a lot of the very finest pictures in the world, which he had bribed one of the Pope’s guard to steal from the Vatican, and which he would sell at a bargain.